Basquiat: Rage to Riches

The legend is well established. The paintings remain stunning. His youth makes it even more amazing and that he was not trained in any way, that he was black and of-the-street. A drug user, graffiti outlaw and irreverent itinerant. It all adds up to the G-E-N-I-U-S label.

But then there is the 'Art World'- he was literally taken up as soon as he started showing his paintings. He was managed, shown and sold.....for so much money by white people.  Then when the raw flash of his work began to fade as taste took his product on board and he became part of something larger, he felt misunderstood, left behind and used. 'Andy Wahol'/'Art World' was not enough to maintain his shooting star shine. His inner core wanted to keep working, making and rocking the boat, but the return from those around him faded. So did he.

His sisters speak in this film and something that they say is really worth listening to. If you want to know Jean-Michel, look at his works. In his short career, Basquiat produced around 1500 drawings, as well as around 600 paintings and many sculpture and mixed media works.

Nearly 30 years after his death from a drug overdose in 1988, the legendary artist Jean-Michel Basquiat has managed to take the world by storm yet again when one of his Skull paintings from 1982 sold recently at Sotheby's for a recorded breaking sum of over one hundred million dollars. The monetary value and art historical importance of work by this former Downtown NYC street graffiti artist is now considered on a par with such luninaries as Picasso, Pollock, and Francis Bacon.

This film features exclusive interviews with Basquiat's two sisters - Lisane and Jeanine Basquiat - who have never before talked about their brother and his art for a TV documentary. Other contributors include some of the most powerful and legendary art dealers in the world such as Bruno Bischofberger, Larry Gagosian, and Mary Boone. They helped fuel Basquiat as he rocketed to art world fame but whose own careers and fortunes may have benefited just as much and possibly more. With striking candor, Basquiat's art dealers as well as his most intimate friends, lovers, and fellow artists spill the beans on the cash, the drugs, and the pernicious racism which Basquiat encountered and fought against on a daily basis. And the main weapon which Basquiat used to fight this racism was his art.

The beating heart of this documentary is the actual art of Basquiat - and the substantive ways in which it embodied and reflected breakthroughs in music, poetry, and a new type of expressionism in modern art. But the story of his life is the raw material for countless legends!

The film reveals for the first time the truth of what actually happened at a swank NYC Soho restaurant - when Basquiat - still only a teenager - had his first legendary encounter with Andy Warhol while hawking his postcards for one dollar each. The film leaves a trail of surprise, joy, and laughter as Basquiat's sisters talk about the unforgettable night in Brooklyn when their brother brought an eccentric friend home for dinner - the eccentric friend was Andy Warhol.

In a 1983 campaign which long predates Black Lives Matter, Basquiat used his art as part of a protest movement following the beating to death by NYC transit cops of a friend of his - Michael Stewart. It was a protest movement joined by Basquiat's one time girlfriend - Madonna.

In this film, these are only some of the many stories that give shape and insight into a life which was constantly torn between public acclaim and personal pain, the bold confidence of has greatness as an artist and the secret fear he would be regarded a flash in the pan, between a deep desire for fame and money but an even deeper resentment that his work was being transformed into a commodity. Basquiat's relationship with drugs and the role they played in his life, work, stellar rise, and fatal crash - is sensitively and insigtfully explored.

Slave Auction, 1982 - Jean-Michel Basquiat

Downtown 81

The film is a day in the life of a young artist, Jean Michel Basquiat, who needs to raise money to reclaim the apartment from which he has been evicted. He wanders the downtown streets ...

Bob Dylan San Francisco Press Conference 1965

Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco televised press conference in full. Recorded on 3 December 1965.

La Moindre des Choses / Every Little Thing (1996 Eng Subs)

Every summer the residents and nurses of La Borde psychiatric hospital (where philosopher psychiatrist Felix Guattari used to work), put on a play. Over the summer of 1995, thanks to Nicolas Philibert, director of the wonderful In the Land of the Deaf, they also made a film. Every Little Thing depicts their everyday goings-on and the rehearsals leading up to a performance of a work by Polish-Argentine writer Witold Grombrowitz.

There is no narration explaining away disabilities or interpreting unusual behaviour; no music to tug at our heartstrings; no dissertation on the wonders of theatrical therapy. Instead Philibert, with gentle lyrical sensitivity, lets people usually hidden from society speak for themselves in their own peculiar ways -- be it through silent movement, stream-of-consciousness speech, or the camera tracking the dance of the leaves on the trees.

We may begin as observers of people walking aimlessly around the grounds lost in their own disjointed thoughts, but Philibert draws us out of our preconceptions and into their world. It's a world that finds joy and tenderness in articulating every emotion, good and bad: from the pleasure of pressing the keys on an accordian for the first time, to the sadness of a man shuffling slowly up to the camera only to remark, 'I can't take any more', and then shuffle off again.

Then there is expression explored through drama and music. Grombowitz's Opérette is modernist absurd theatre, the lines, ironically, more nonsensical than those of this production's actors. When one actor is asked why he particularly likes the third act, he replies: 'The castle is ruined, the wind blows, the lines are totally illogical... that comforts me.'

Finally we witness the afternoon performance. Set in the tranquil sun-dappled gardens, with fantastical costumes, outrageous dramatics and an added psychiatric edge, voilà! there's magnificent and jubilant theatrical chaos. — Mark Amery

Klaus Kinski - Jesus Christus Erlöser (1971 komplett)

Klaus Kinski’s infamous intensity and lunacy are both on vivid display in Klaus Kinski: Jesus Christ the Savior, a recently recovered record of a 1971 theatrical performance by the Aguirre, The Wrath of God star. On a German stage outfitted with only a microphone stand, Kinski steps into a lone spotlight and begins reciting an extended monologue about a persecuted, angry Jesus Christ: “Wanted: Jesus Christ. Charged with seduction, anarchistic tendencies, conspiracy against the authority of the state.” From the outset, Kinski’s own god-complex association with his divine subject, whose role he soon assumes via speaking in first-person, is clear, and immediately rankles segments of the crowd who’ve attended simply to heckle. As audience members cry out, “I want my 10 marks back!,” and call out Kinski for what they see as the hypocrisy of his performance (the wealthy star extols anti-materialism and nonviolence, while also railing against his tormentors with threats of physical aggression), the show’s powder keg atmosphere ignites. Kinski storms off stage, albeit not before screaming, “You stupid pig!,” to a young man who tries, and fails, to command the mike before being removed by a security guard—to predictable audience objections to Kinski as a “fascist!”

A version of this scenario repeats throughout the night, as Kinski returns to the mike, only to be browbeaten by certain audience members convinced that they have a role to play in the evening. Director Peter Geyer’s archival footage, comprised of material from a select few cameras, has a fixated gaze that mirrors Kinski’s ferocity, which escalates as his performance forcefully mutates hallowed scripture into messages about contemporary flashpoints, be they Vietnam, hippies, or a more general strain of post-Woodstock opposition to institutional government and church power. Confronting taunts and ridicule with disgust and fury, Kinski becomes a bipolar figure, at once justified in his rage and clear-sighted in his condemnations, and yet the antithesis of the very virtues he so extols. Jesus Christ Savior, however, is mostly the portrait of the artist as an empathetically committed zealot and hotheaded madman, of a star attempting to communicate (and expunge from within) ideas and emotions that seemingly animate and torment him. And it ultimately proves a quite riveting one at that, even if its dynamite volatility and hypnotic momentum drains by Kinski’s third walkout and final, triumphant, post-credits recitation of his divine dissertation.

Dogs In Space (1986)

Dogs in Space is a 1986 Australian film set in Melbourne's punk "Little Band" music scene in 1978. Directed by Richard Lowenstein and stars Michael Hutchence as Sam, the drug-addled frontman of the fictitious band from which the film takes its name.

Yagé is Our Life - Documentary

Yagé is Our Life is a documentary film captured in the Putumayo region of Colombia. For centuries the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon have been using yagé (sometimes known as ayahuasca) for the health, social cohesion and spiritual guidance of their communities. Yagé is rich in the potent psychedelic substance DMT and for these indigenous groups it is sacred, allowing them access to ancient wisdom and the spirits of nature. In their ceremonies, the taitas or traditional doctors use yagé to treat their patients for physical and emotional illnesses and as a guide for making decisions.


The communities are now facing many new threats to their traditional way of life. Primarily, the commercialisation of their yagé medicine and foreign pressures exerted on their homelands by industrialised civilisation. This film gives indigenous leaders from the region a platform to discuss these issues and the importance of yagé as a living tradition in their communities.


Winner of the 'Best International Short Film' at the Respect Human Rights Film Festival, Belfast, 2017.

The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920)

The Golem: How He Came into the World (German: Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, also referred to as Der Golem) is a 1920 silent horror film and a leading example of early German Expressionism. Paul Wegener starred as the titular creature, as well as co-directing the film with Carl Boese and co-writing the script with Henrik Galeen based on Gustav Meyrink's 1915 novel. Photographer Karl Freund went on to work on the 1930s classic Universal horror films years later in Hollywood. This was the third of three films that Wegener made featuring the golem, the other two being The Golem (1915) and the short comedy The Golem and the Dancing Girl (1917), in which Wegener dons the golem make-up in order to frighten a young lady with whom he is infatuated. The Golem: How He Came into the World is a prequel to The Golem from 1915 and as the only one of the three films that has not been lost, is the best known of the series.

Set in the Jewish ghetto of medieval Prague, the film begins with Rabbi Loew, the head of the city's Jewish community, reading the stars. Loew predicts disaster for his people and brings his assistant to inform the elders of the community. The next day the Holy Roman Emperor signs a royal decree declaring that the Jews must leave the city before the new moon. The Emperor sends the knight Florian to deliver the decree. Loew meanwhile begins to devise a way of defending the Jews.

Upon arriving at the ghetto, the arrogant Florian falls in love with Miriam, Loew's daughter, for whom his assistant shares affection. Loew talks Florian into reminding the Emperor that it is he who predicts disasters and tells the horoscopes of the Emperor, and requests an audience with him. Having courted with Miriam, Florian leaves. By praying with God first, Loew begins to create the Golem, a huge monster which he will bring to life out of clay to defend his people. Florian returns later with a request from the Emperor for Loew to attend the Rose Festival at the palace. He shares a romantic moment with Miriam while Loew reveals to his assistant that he has secretly created the Golem, and requires his assistance to animate it. In an elaborate magical procedure, Loew and the assistant summon the spirit Astaroth and compel him, as per the ancient texts, to say the magic word to bring life. This word is written on paper by Loew which is then enclosed in an amulet and inserted onto the Golem's chest. The Golem awakes. Loew's assistant then tames the Golem, and the Rabbi uses it as a household servant.